First light from the summit

Boulder-based photographer releases book of shots from 14ers at sunrise

0

You feel the fluid building up, and you feel a kind of rattling in your lungs,” says Glenn Randall of a night spent in a snowbound tent in the Sawatch range, high-altitude pulmonary edema (HAPE) slowly drowning him. He’d had the condition before, at 16,000 feet in Alaska.

“If you’ve had it once, you’ll always know what it feels like,” Randall says. He felt the symptoms hit him late at night but decided to wait until dawn to descend. By that time he was in serious trouble.

Randall, a Boulderbased photographer, recently released a new book, Sunrise from the Summit, which portrays all 54 of Colorado’s 14,000-foot-tall peaks at first light. It took seven years, from the time he climbed the first “14er,” Mount Elbert, in May 2006, until the last in August 2013. The quest was interrupted by a pair of back surgeries — part of his legacy of decades spent in the mountains — and studded with chance encounters and near disasters like his scrape with high-altitude pulmonary edema.

It was an unbelievably snowy May, and Randall was camped at about 12,500 feet in the basin below Oxford, Belford and Missouri peaks. To capture the arc of the Milky Way mantling the summits, Randall was in the habit of leaving camp about 11 p.m., fighting the darkness, snow and cold to arrive at summit two-and-a-half hours before sunrise. After three nights, the routine was wearing on him, and he suspected a respiratory problem, but it was hard work to get to that spot, and he didn’t want to abandon the trip. Late on the fourth night, Randall began feeling the symptoms of HAPE, which kills a mountaineer by drowning his lungs in fluid. The condition is commonly associated with very high mountains but can occur anywhere above 8,200 feet. The only cure is to descend as quickly as possible.

By morning, his condition was bad; it took him 30 or 40 breaths to lace a boot. By the time he’d broken camp, he realized there was no way he could carry his pack, so he ditched his gear, grabbed his car keys and a bottle of water and began snowshoeing out. It took seven hours to descend 3.5 miles, but he eventually made it back to his car and was able to drive home. Recovery took several days, during which he hired someone in Leadville to climb back to his camp to get his gear.

“He’s a hardcore mountaineer as well as a professional photographer,” says Will Harmon, senior editor at Farcountry Press.

“You don’t want a book of 54 shots looking east into the rising sun,” Harmon continues, “so it’s a matter of figuring out when the light will be best on the surrounding peaks and terrain.”

Which meant Randall needed to plan carefully, looking at the face of each peak and knowing where on the horizon he needed the sun to rise to provide the most dramatic lighting, then timing that perfect sunrise astronomically. Thus a book of 54 photos took seven years, and Randall often found himself climbing through snow in the middle of the night.

Climbing in tough conditions is nothing new to Randall, however, who has well over 200 magazine publications to his credit, including Rock and Ice, Climbing, National Geographic Adventure and Outdoor Photographer. He has worked as far away as Chile and Argentina but specializes in Colorado.

“I’m not the globetrotting photojournalist,” he says. “I feel that the diligent local photographer should always have the best images of an area because going back to an area over and over produces the best results.”

With two daughters, family was another reason he chose to stay close.

“When I walked in the door, I wanted them to recognize me,” he says.

Randall moved to Colorado in 1975 to study journalism at the University of Colorado, but having spent much of his early life climbing in his native California, he felt called to adventure in the mountains. After graduation he was posed a dilemma: an internship with the Silverton Standard & the Miner or a trip with friends to Alaska to try a new route on Mount Huntington. He didn’t agonize for long. The internship could wait. He chronicled the ascent in film and was able to sell the article to Alaska Magazine, which probably paid about as much as he spent on airfare, as he recalls, but the trajectory of his life was set.

“At that point, I figured I would just be an outdoor adventure journalist,” he says.

For over a decade, he was. Randall covered rock climbing, ice climbing, mountaineering, ski mountaineering, expeditionary mountaineering — every type of mountaineering there was, for magazines like Climbing.

“I started technical rock climbing in high school and climbed pretty hard until the late ’80s when I got married, and I started to lose my interest in it,” he says. “I wanted to respond to the mountains aesthetically rather than as technical challenges.”

In 1993, he bought his first fourby-five field camera, which, although large and heavy, can capture incredible detail, and he began shooting wilderness landscapes. It became his passion, almost to total exclusion of the adrenaline stuff, until the Sunrise on the Summit project came along.

“I had to rediscover old skills; there wasn’t really any roped climbing, but there was a lot of scrambling, and because I shot a lot of the book in the winter, there was a good deal of crampon and ice ax work,” he says.

When he began the project, Randall says, “the way to do photography really well was to carry around a field camera, which is heavy, so I would carry 70 pounds of backpacking and photo gear, and I only weigh 140 pounds. That’s almost certainly what led to the herniated disc in my lumbar spine.”

Randall fought his injuries for a couple years and carried on with the project, but it became clear that he couldn’t continue on as he had been. Randall had back surgery twice in 2008 and the Sunrise project looked doomed. Right around the time he was feeling recovered enough to get back to work, digital technology was finally catching  up to film. Randall thought that with a lighter, smaller kit, he might be able to continue the project. He discovered that digital cameras could capture contrast in ways film never could, which allowed him to add new dimensions to his photography, and with the compact, lighter gear, he could get back to work.

“I think there might have been some quality of the midlife perspective to this challenge he set for himself,” says Harmon, who was a wilderness ranger who loved working in grizzly country before entering the publishing world. He says the project was both a personal challenge and an attempt to cause people to see what Randall himself sees in the mountains.

“At least 150,000 and as many as 350,000 people attempt to summit a 14er each year, so more than 400 people a day on summer weekends hike up the easiest routes on the most accessible peaks,” Randall says. Some people feel that he should use his talents to show what’s happening to nature, how it is being destroyed.

“A 14,000-foot peak might seem indestructible, but it’s not,” he says. “I’m not ignorant about what’s happening to the world, but that’s not what I’ve chosen to focus on.”

Randall encourages people to support the Colorado Fourteeners Initiative, a nonprofit trying to build sustainable routes on the 14ers so that the mountains remain as special as they are now.

“People on popular routes really need to stay on the trail,” he says. “Otherwise, there will be multiple trails, which will erode and turn into gullies and make the whole place an ugly, eroded mess.”

As much as the book is a caution to people to preserve the beautiful places remaining to us, it is also a collection of the weird, the wonderful, the dangerous and sometimes grim world of the high country.

“It wasn’t very dangerous. I don’t want to give anyone the feeling that it was,” Randall says of the many climbs he had to do over the course of the Sunrise project, but he did face some peril. At least once his headlamp died during a night climb. Another time, a refrigerator-sized boulder melted out of the cliff face it had clung to for so long, and came crashing down across his tracks, roughly 100 feet in front of him.

“As Gerry Roach put it, ‘Geologic time includes now,’” he says.

Another time, on a winter ascent of Pyramid Peak, Randall met some climbers responding to a distress signal coming from North Maroon peak, opposite them, where another party of climbers had encountered a body. The body was that of a mountaineer who had flown in from New York and gone missing on Maroon Bells. Randall was aware of the situation because search and rescue had visited his tent.

“I knew by that time he was probably already dead,” he says. 

The climber seemed to have summited, but the Maroon Bells can present some tricky route-finding, and he fell trying to descend through a storm.

Still, it wasn’t all danger and hardship. The mountains also blessed Randall with beautiful moments. Quandary Peak was the first 14er he’d done in the winter, and standing in darkness waiting for sunrise, he remembers looking over his shoulder and seeing three sleeping mountain goats.

He wondered what were they doing there, more than 3,000 vertical feet above anything they could eat.

“I waited for them to wake up, and at sunrise they did and thoughtfully posed for me on the summit with Mount of the Holy Cross in the background,” he says. “Summits are magical places, and I wanted to make images that would capture the feeling.”

The images in the book are not the typical “gentle wilderness shots,” as Randall says. The view from the summit is awe-inspiring, he says, and often a little intimidating.

“I’ve chosen to celebrate the remaining wild places and to celebrate the beauty of them,” he says, “to capture the sense of awe that I feel when I encounter nature at its finest.”